Rum Night

October 2003

I took a deep breath, peeled myself off the Sinai, and caught the ferry up through the Gulf of Aqaba to Jordan. The first box to check on my guidebook-driven itinerary was Wadi Rum, the spectacular desert valley where Lawrence of Arabia was filmed. The valley was punctuated by ancient stone mountains that had been sculpted into grotesquely beautiful shapes by the erosive currents of ancient seas and a billion years of wind. Some of them looked like slightly melted gothic cathedrals with flying buttresses and everything. I took a Jeep tour to see some natural bridges, ancient rock carvings, and watering holes where Bedouins served tea and sold five-minute camel rides to shirtless Hungarian tourists.

At night our guide set up camp against a sheer rock cliff and rustled up some burnt, undercooked chicken and delicious roasted tomatoes and onions. After dinner we had tea and fruit next to the cliff while a friend of our guide played his lute. The moon lit up the sand and mountains to the west and south while we were still in the moon-shade of the wall, and it was otherworldly beautiful. The border of the moon-shadow advanced on us until midnight, when the full moon cleared the cliff above us.

I wandered away to find a nice dune to sit on and take it all in. The moon had a bright ring around it about twenty moon-diameters across, which made it look like the dome of the great cathedral. The jagged stone mountains were like pillars conjured by God, and the surrounding sea of silken sand softly refracted the moonlight’s radiance. The stars, subtly colored, brilliant, three-dimensional, embedded in the silvery ink of unlikely existence, took my breath away. The breeze, neither warm nor cool, seemed to blow through me. And then—

A sudden crescendo, and I was overcome. My cup wasn’t just running over—it was being made a sheer mockery of, like a wine glass placed under a thousand-foot waterfall; I was battered utterly senseless by warm, weightless bliss and wonder. It was as clear as a diamond that there was nothing to fear and nothing to hope for; the universe was already more perfect than my wildest reckoning. Even the air shimmered, and the universe appeared as a thrillingly brimming void, a perfect sanctuary, crystalline in perfection yet warm and inviting in its carefree chaos. There was no meaningful distance between me and the stars. The only distraction from perfect happiness was a sweet, desperate longing to be a bigger vessel so that I could feel more of this vast surging current of benevolence within me all at once. Gratitude exuded from me like a scent...

Alas, alas. My reverie was punctured by my Bedouin guide ambling up the side of my dune to investigate whether the romance of the setting might incline me toward romance with him. I couldn’t bear to desecrate this setting with anything as banal as his foolish hopes or my irritation. Claiming exhaustion, I walked back to camp and lay down next to the fire, sighing as my head descended slowly out of orbit and back toward the shared reality of the everyday.

Money, cars, hotels... That was my incomprehensible tomorrow. For appearance’s sake, I knew that I would have to pretend, to convince myself, that it was all more real and more important than that moment on the dune.

Somehow, by the very next morning, I managed to.

But while I was on the dune, in my mind I wrote a poem to try to capture it, although no poem should be mistaken for the reality it tries clumsily to point toward.

A barren moon
reflects
a barren earth.

The silvery sky
mocks my best attempts
at reverence.

Elsewhere life rages.

Here it is subtle,
hushed,
as if in the presence
of divinity.

The mountains
may once have been
high as the Himalayas;
after a billion years
of seas and wind,
they are sculpted
down to unfathomable
stone hearts -
cathedral islands
in a sea of silken sand.

Reflections echo
each other
in the brimming void
of nature's holy sanctuary.
Silent gratitude
is drawn from my soul;
the night needs me
like I need it.

The breeze
- neither warm nor cool -
makes me feel
like I'm not here
on this impossible planet
whose atmosphere
I suddenly
fail to see
and fail to feel.

There is nothing
between me
and the stars.